Dia de los Muertos

Whoa, it rained last night!

These are some of the drops that hung on my fern pine this morning, the dim light making me use a low-light exposure.

***

Today was Dia de los Muertos, and at Mass, our pastor talked about purgation and the afterlife. It's not popular nowadays to talk about death, or -- heaven help us -- purgation. No one believes they are going to die, and no one believes they will be held accountable for all the little shit (or big shit) they did in their lives. Popular media spouts that people become angels when they die, and all of them go to heaven.

If you study the religions of the world, you find that not one of them says that is the case. Instead, most of them talk about a period or journey that requires souls to leave behind them that which they think was important in life: beauty, wealth, associations; or to embark on a journey that strives to attain something that is beyond beauty, wealth, or associations. Only after leaving behind the earthly stuff, or striving for the non-earthly stuff, is completion, or Heaven, attained. 

The interim time between death and "heaven" is about purgation, if the soul hasn't bothered to deal with it before.

 (Yes, I believe there is a "Hell" -- a place without God for those who have no desire or interest to be with God. That's also what my church teaches. God is not a machine-gun pointed at every soul's head. God does not demand, "Love Me or I will kill you." But God will allow anyone the choice of existing outside of Heaven.)

What makes me fixate on Purgation today? Why, my mother's condition, wasting slowly away with Alzheimer's Syndrome. 

My mother was always a very proud (arrogant) person, always always always ragging and bragging about how she had raised the family up from poverty to prosperity. (We're talking small town prosperity here, not riches, BTW) Now, though she is declining in health with Alzheimers, she is well-kept with 24-hr care in her own home. Her financial acumen of her mid-years has borne fruit: she can live in her own home, amidst all her (meager) possessions, and need not go to a nursing home.

But all her pride is being taken away; this is her time of Purgation. Her ready wit, her savvy about money, her care for her property -- all gone. Her control over her estate, the doorways of her home, her ability to light a wood fire in the furnace and heat her home -- all gone. Her family -- God help us, all of us were her possessions -- is all beyond her reach to control and manipulate. 

Her care-givers make sure she dresses or is dressed appropriately; they take her where she might want to go; they take care of her property and her bills are all paid by a trust fund. She could smile and accept that she is in comfort, but she does not.

Instead, she pretends that there is nothing wrong with her, and fights every offer of help, and hates that she's been taken care off.

I watch her, in her purgation, and wonder what she'll let go before the end.

And I pray for her.